Back to the Beach

By GUY TREBAY

Published: June 1, 2006

WHEN Jimmy Buffett hit Rockefeller Center plaza last week, to plunk away at his guitar for the ''Today'' show, the Bard of Margaritaville came barefoot and wearing vintage-looking board shorts and a T-shirt, as if to signal that summer had officially begun. Make that the Endless Summer. It has been decades since Mr. Buffett first tapped into the cultural sweet spot that is surf culture. And, while his take on beach bum narratives typically leads to a bar stool and the sun slipping behind the Key West horizon, that his philosophical roots are in the culture of wave-riding seems perfectly -- one could almost say, gin -- clear.

Lately, the octopus grasp of surf culture has become so inescapable that it is hard to contemplate a time, just over a half-century ago, when surfers were legitimate counterculture types, a wave-riding minority of oddballs, semi-sociopaths, dropouts, athletically gifted isolates with the occasional drug or messiah problem, or just all-around good-time freaks.

That was long before the waves at Ditch Plains on Long Island became so crowded after Memorial Day that one practically has to take a number before paddling out; before those Americans who call themselves surfers rose 90 percent to 2.7 million between 1987 and 2005; before Quiksilver, the surf wear behemoth founded by two surfing buddies, started clocking revenues of $541 million a quarter, as it did in the first months of 2006; before Laird Hamilton, the big-wave riding Adonis whose ego is commensurate with the 30-footers he routinely attacks, went from being the sport's Evel Knievel to being a spokesman for Davidoff cologne and American Express.

Describing the surfer ''denizens'' of Windansea Beach in San Diego in his 1965 book, ''The Pump House Gang,'' Tom Wolfe wryly noted that ''surfing was just 25 percent sport and 75 percent way of life.'' It was, Mr. Wolfe wrote, ''a curious thing to build a communal life around.'' Even more improbable, it would have seemed then, was that the sport of ancient Hawaiians would one day provide the basis for a multibillion-dollar clothing business, which was celebrated last week at the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association's ninth annual conclave, its largest ever, held in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

''It's about the big brands that continue to dominate the core retail landscape and the small brands that bring newness to the younger core kids,'' Dick Baker, the association president, told 410 attendees, according to a fashion trade publication. Curiously, though, it may be that fewer of the fabled ''younger core kids'' are driving the surf style business than one might imagine. This is hinted at in Quiksilver's current description of itself as ''producers of clothing, accessories and related products for young-minded people and developers of brands that represent a casual lifestyle driven from a board-riding heritage.''

''Young-minded'' and ''board-riding heritage'' seem to suggest that one qualifies as a surfer if one has seen ''Step Into Liquid,'' the 2003 documentary on surfing's elite athletes and their secret haunts, and purchased a pair of Billabong shorts. And there is nothing wrong with that. But before the last remaining shreds of original surf style and culture are crammed into the grinder of commerce to be processed into sartorial scrapple -- made from equal parts flip-flops-and-board-shorts and T-shirts-and-hoodies and flat-fronts-and-Hawaiian-Punch-bucket-hat -- it may be worthwhile to revisit the original spirit of the sport.

''I think with surfing, there was this absolute moment of almost innocence after the war,'' said John McWhinnie, who in 2001 organized a fine show of surf-related art titled ''Surf's Up''in East Hampton, N.Y. He was referring, of course, to the Second World War and the rebellious surf culture that emerged at its conclusion.

Almost concurrent with the arrival of the Beats on the cultural landscape, surfing produced its own array of rebels, dropouts and outlaws, albeit these radicals tended to have a tan. ''That was all transformed totally by 'Gidget,' '' Mr. McWhinnie said, referring to the unkillable 1959 Sandra Dee movie that was made from a novel Frederick Kohner allegedly based on the antics of his teenage daughter and a passel of her surf-crazed buddies at Malibu. ''That's when the commercial engines that drive the economy seized on this as another form of teenage rebellion they would commodify.''

Who can blame them? It is possible that no sport practiced by fewer people has ever had the influence of surfing on American style. This proposition is put to the test this month as a batch of new books about surf culture arrives in bookstores, along with a gallery exhibit pitched at the surprisingly large cohort of secret surfers who happen to live in New York, the least obvious of surfing towns.

Among surf cultists (and rare book dealers) the handful of books put out over the past decade by the art director and surfer Tom Adler are genuinely coveted objects, beginning with ''Don James: Surfing San Onofre to Point Dune: 1936-1942.'' This modest volume compiles the photographs of Mr. James, a Los Angeles neighbor of Mr. Adler's who was an early beach boy turned surfer turned dentist. Mr. James's neglected scrapbook of photographs was ultimately enshrined in Mr. Adler's 1997 book, the pictures of surfers and board shapers and bathing beauties (both female and male) offering an enchanted view into the hedonistic promise of surf life along the southern California coastline at a time when there were probably no more than 200 practitioners of the sport. The effect of the book is like looking at flashcards from an American Eden.